Dan Kennedy's blog on media and politics • published by the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to 2005

Saturday, July 24, 2004

THE CLINTON NON-SCANDALS
REVISITED. A confession: the scales didn't fall
from my eyes until
September 1998, when Bill Clinton's nemesis, special prosecutor Ken
Starr, issued his pornographic report. Up until then, I had actually
believed that Starr would somehow tie the Monica Lewinsky matter to
Whitewater. My favorite theory was that Clinton associate Vernon
Jordan, who had attempted to find a job for Lewinsky, could be
pressured into testifying about what if any favors he had done for
Clinton's crooked friend Webster
Hubbell, who was
maintaining his silence from his prison cell.

The Starr Report removed all such
illusions. Suddenly, the entire country knew (and believe me, the
country was ahead of most of us in the media) that the president was
being pursued by an out-of-control right-wing extremist whose
obsession with sex revealed a highly disturbed mind. The fever broke,
and Clinton's presidency survived, though it was permanently
weakened.

Those events still seem so recent -
and so irrelevant following 9/11 - that I wasn't sure I wanted to
relive them. But on Friday evening, I saw a new documentary about the
Clinton non-scandals by Clinton buddy Harry Thomason and Nickolas
Perry, The
Hunting of the President,
at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Based on Joe Conason and Gene Lyons's
bookThe Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy
Bill Clinton, the film is flawed, and it's difficult to see where
it's going to find an audience. Fahrenheit 9/11 it isn't. Yet
it does manage to bring home in an occasionally powerful way the
madness that gripped the media and political worlds before and during
Clinton's presidency, all of it driven by - as Hillary Clinton
memorably called it - the vast right-wing conspiracy.

First, the flaws. I nearly laughed
when, near the beginning, journalist-turned-Clinton-aide Sidney
Blumenthal smugly explained that the right decided to destroy Clinton
because it feared the change he represented. You may recall that
during his first two years in the White House, Clinton bet his
presidency on forming alliances with corrupt hacks like Dan
Rostenkowski, who eventually went to prison. Later Clinton hooked up
with such noted reformers as Dick Morris. Clinton's alleged reformist
zeal couldn't have been detected with a microscope. If he had
been more of a reformer, he might have made more of a
mark.

Also, Thomason and Perry don't
trust the audience's attention span. The Hunting of the
President is edited as though it were made for MTV, with
head-whipping scene changes and a liberal use of clips from old
black-and-white movies to inject a note of fun into the proceedings.
It doesn't work.

But there is much of value here, as
Thomason and Perry meticulously recount the Arkansas branch of the
Clinton scandals, none of which ever amounted to a damn thing. Most
important, we see Ken Starr for what he was: a politically motivated
Republican activist, an ideological extremist with absolutely no
integrity. It is amazing that, to this day, Starr has not been
disbarred or otherwise sanctioned for his grotesque abuse of office.
Far from it: in April, Starr was named dean
of Pepperdine University's school of law, an institution that has
benefited from the generosity of another right-wing extremist and
fellow-traveler in the Arkansas wars, Richard Mellon Scaife. It's a
job that Starr nearly took in the middle of the Whitewater
investigation. Too bad he didn't.

The undisputed star of The
Hunting of the President is Susan McDougal, the woman who would
not lie. In a long, emotional interview, McDougal recounts how her
ex-husband, the late Jim McDougal, terrified of being sent to prison,
urged her to go along with Starr and his gang, who were trying to get
her to fabricate a story and testify about illegal business dealings
with Bill and/or Hillary Clinton. She recalls her ex-husband telling
her, "They'll give you the story - you don't have to worry about it."
She wouldn't do it, and she served hard time for that refusal, being
imprisoned in a ward for child-killing mothers, locked in a cage on
bus on the way to court appearances as male prisoners masturbated in
front of her and urinated on her.

Dan Moldea, the author
of A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a
Political Firestorm, expresses disgust to Thomason and Perry
about the media's complicity in amplifying Starr's leaks in order to
move the scandal forward, calling it "the most corrupt journalism"
he'd ever seen. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter talks about how
socially unacceptable it was within media circles for a journalist to
write or say anything positive about the Clintons. The Washington
Post's Howard Kurtz recalls the media burying a story about the
Clintons' being cleared of some fairly serious Whitewater
allegations.

The Hunting of the President
begins and ends with Arkansas senator Dale Bumpers's memorable speech
during Clinton's Senate impeachment trial, in which he said, "When
they say it's not about sex, it's about sex." That would be bad
enough. The deeper truth, though, is that it wasn't even about sex.
It was about getting Clinton by any means necessary.

It's impossible to know whether
Clinton could have been a great president, but we do know this: given
the 10-year-long witch hunt devoted to destroying him and his wife,
he really never had a chance to do much more than hang on and
survive.

And Clinton's enemies on the right
and in the media are still at large. They helped destroy Al Gore's
campaign four years ago, and they're primed to go after John Kerry
today. Amid the celebrating in Boston this coming week, Kerry's
strategists had better be ready for what's to come. Because Scaife,
Starr, and their fellow right-wing thugs make Karl Rove look like a
weenie.

1 comment:

Dan,I haven't seen the film, yet. Thanks for the synopsis. I think that your attack on Clinton's first couple of years (and, his subsequent use of Morris) is a bit harsh. Rostenkowski was the guy who could make things happen in Congress. Remember that the big fear for the Clintons was that they'd revisit the Carter years where Democrats fought each other, nothing happened, and everyone got swept out in 4 years. Clinton had to work with Rostenkowski. In any event, Clinton came into office and Bob Dole led a filibuster on his stimulus plan. Eventually, every single Republican voted against Clinton's budget. A budget that he ran on and the American people supported (mostly) (The people who voted for Perot would have supported a deficit reduction budget as well.) That's the attacking from gop from the very beginning that I believe that Conason is talking about.Morris was just a political consultant. Stephanopolous said that he would come up with 20 ideas in minutes. 90% of them were garbage. Clinton may have selected 1 to go work on. Now, Morris is a rightwing Clinton-obsessed hack.

About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.